Station_two, Curt's first sentence was "I would definately NOT install CS2. " which is why I asked him to clarify that he mean uninstall, not install . I realised it was probably a typo, but just wanted to be sure . (with apologies if you were just having a joke here - sorry, lack of body language and all that, haha!)

If deleting C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge CS6 cannot resolve this issue, but only creating new account can, I am afraid that you need to port your settings to the new user. Because we did not find what cause this issue exactly. Sorry for this.

Anyway, I'm gald you can use Bridge now. Thanks for supporting Adobe products and Bridge!

I've had this same exact problem. I also tried all the suggestions, including checking settings, deleting C:\Users\[your user name]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Bridge CS6 (including the directory itself). No luck. Adding a new user, then using it to start Bridge worked great, but that is not really a solution. One added piece of info: Bridge did recreate the above directory before dying, although it remains empty. I haven't found any logfiles that might help understand how far it got. Is there a log file or a registry setting that will enable detailed logging to help diagnose this?

There is obviously something in my normal user's profile or environment that is getting in the way of startup. You (Adobe) have the code and the startup can't be that convoluted. Someone should be able to walk the code, figure out what things are checked between creating the above directory and the next externally detectable step (like creating a file in this directory or logging something into a log file), then reply here with a list of specific things to check.

I got into a chat with Adobe support several days ago, where I went through several steps of ensuring I was using a properly licensed version only to be told that he didn't know Bridge and asked that I call during the day on Monday. The sign off message to that chat was funny - they mentioned 24x365 support :-) Luckily, I've worked support in my past and I have a sense of humor.

If anyone knew what to be looking for it sounds like you'd be the one. After giving up on Bridge and all of the current 'solutions', I've still had an interest in what went wrong, but not enough to deal with people telling me to come back when somebody competant decides to come around. I'm thinking this problem has been popular enough to become almost a priority now, so best of luck! (:

Actually, I'd love to work for Adobe for a few days to dig in and fix this issue ;-) I'm a software engineer turned product manager in my day job for a company down the road from Adobe (in a non-competing industry) and greatly admire most of what Adobe has produced. Actually, I guess I'd love to work for Adobe in general - it would be nice to work on my toys as a day job :-)

These little problems can be extremely tricky to solve until you get enough information to recreate. I can recreate it at will but don't have the tools to dig in. I'm sure Adobe would love to solve this, but they obviously haven't recreated it themselves. All they can do is try to make good suggestions or provide tools or debug procedures that we can use to provide them better info.

Adobe, are you listening to mjw5997? He wants to work for you and fix this problem. From all I've seen and read, it sounds like an embarrassing percentage of your customers (who've spent, in many cases, an obscene amount of money for this software) are simply not getting the goods they paid for.

I reckon, if you value your reputation, you'd be pretty dumb not to take on someone who is prepared to dig you out of this pit - you don't seem to have anyone else working for you who knows how to do it, so what have you got to lose?

I'd bet it's actually a very tiny percentage of customers - many thousands of happy quiet customers, and a few having troubles and posting here.

I tend to agree. Not an Adobe employee, or even a computer whiz, but dealing with thousands of complaints I have seen a pattern.

There are those problems that are true bugs and affect everyone. Adobe can easily reproduce the problem in the lab and eventually write a fix.

Then there are the bugs that affect a small percentage of users, like this issue, that are not easy to reproduce in the lab. For whatever reason it is some combination of OS, hardware, software, permission levels, installation (programs work best on C drive), and user errors that results in the program not working on that particular computer. Because there are slight variations in all computer configurations a fix for one may not result in a fix for another. One also has the added complexity of the user practices, such as did the user just delete a program so there are bits and pieces left over to complicate things, have they moved pieces of the program to other locations "to make it look more organized", was there a glitch in the install process or uninstall of old programs, are the OS, drivers, software up to date?

In complex cases that affect a small number of users, from my experience, the best bet for success is to have the users with the problems start comparing notes. Anti-virus programs are always first on the list of potential problems, then come programs that "handle" certain issues, remapping keys, storing fonts, and so forth.

I don't mean to pass the buck, or give excuses for Adobe, but waiting for Adobe "to just fix it" will never happen if the issue can not be reproduced in the lab. And to get it reproduced will require a lot of work from the users. There are some really smart users out there and it may be someone like mjw5997 that identifies the problem.

I post user fixes all the time as Adobe has not rewritten the code to address the problem of these particular issues.

I have no idea if the following is helpful (I suspect only Adobe can use this):

In Uses/[me]/AppData/Local/Temp, the following file is generated by Bridge momentarily during startup, then it is deleted when it fails to start. I quickly grabbed and edited it so I could post the contents here:

Can you tell me your email address? I want to tell you how to enable dmp file generation. If your system can already generate dmp files, please check your dmp file folder and see whether there is any dmp file generated after the launch failure.

I renamed my exising c:\users\[me]\AppData\Roaming\Adobe to Adobe2 to get it out of the way, then created a new empty Adobe directory. When I started Bridge, it created a Bridge CS6 directory and stopped as always. The Bridge CS6 directory is empty.

I am having the same problem with Bridge that does not open...with my recent purchase of PS CS6 Extended student version.....whenever I try to open Bridge it does nothing but generating the following report to Apple....This is a new Mac OS X laptop so no previous CS of any kind.....Please let me know how to go about it....As I would like to have the full benefit of this software....Thank you in advanced.

If if is a permission error that is based in the operating system. Sometimes one can do a workaround with a permission problem if you right click on the Bridge icon and choose "run as administrator". THis is a different permission level that having full permission. If this changes anything the next step is to see what needs to be changed. Frequently occurs with external drives or drives that have been moved from one computer to another (ownership issue).

I have no clue how Bridge did muck your system up but in the before Lion and ML period this usually was solved by performing an Archive and Install from your original OS install disk. This provided a back up of your old user library and created a fresh one while all applications and files stayed on your system (although you should first make a back up of all important files for security) and took not more then half an hour. While I believe this is still possible but then you have to download the OS again from the App Store and create an install DVD your self (try and Google this for detailed info).

But I would first start with a Check and Repair permissions using Apple Disk Utility (in the application / utilities folder) and try if that solves this problem.

And I don't think Archive and Install in Mt. Lion is the way to go because, as I mentioned in my first post, Bridge will start in the Guest User account.

That is what an archive an install does, creating a fresh user account library and copy the old one. I'm still not on Mountain Lion (waiting for the new macPro to appear) but I have created a install Disk myself from the Lion edition I did buy in the App Store. Also believe the archive and install is still an option, only can't check it now.

Try a Google search for this. In the past (CS3 and CS4 mainly) the new user account test was a common check if all other options did not work, and in those cases an Archive and Install did the trick.

You can try also first to uninstall CS6 and use the Adobe cleaner tool (read the manual carefully, no dangerous stuff but be sure to have a back up) and then reinstall CS6 again as fresh.

But no guarantee this will solve it either, Bridge can be quit critical on installing, don't know what procedure or action caused this but it has been a problem (not common btw) before.